Browsing by Subject "Short story"
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Item A comparative study of a group of short story textbooks(Texas Tech University, 1938-06) Griffin, FredNot availableItem Changes in the Short Story from 1925 to 1936(Texas Tech University, 1936-08) Sullivan, John BNot Available.Item Letters from the heart(Texas Tech University, 2003-05) Geyer, Andrew BurkeA short story cycle is a collection of interconnected stories. The origin of the short story cycle lies in the 19'^ century, with the expanded version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. However, it was not until the early 20th century, with the publication of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, that the genre flowered into its modern, tightly-integrated form. This dissertation is a short story cycle written in the tradition of Winesburg, Ohio. Letters from the Heart uses the linking devices of continuing protagonists; a consistent setting; a progressive development of theme; the recurrence of people, places, objects, and situations; continuing ideas; and framing episodes that begin and end the collection to integrate the pieces that make up the cycle into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. There are five continuing protagonists in Letters from the Heart, Joseph Jasmine, Harry the Hippy, Annie Wild, Bryan "Barkeep," Cacahuetita, and Kurt. All of these recurring first-person narrators develop across time as the stories unfold. The eighteen pieces that make up Letters from the Heart are all set in Austin, Texas. The stories either take place in Austin, or the characters are Austinites who have left the city for reasons that become clear as the collection develops. Every piece that makes up Letters from the Heart turns in some way on the theme of a coming Apocalypse. The stories take place at the end of the 20th century, and the approaching Millennium lends an air of impending catastrophe that affects the characters' lives. Like the continuing protagonists, all of the major characters in Letters from the Heart develop across stories as the plotlines play out. The characters' lives grow richer as a result of their relationships with one another. There are four linked plotlines in Letters from the Heart. All four plot sequences, which play out across multiple stories, interconnect in the nexus piece, "Words to Live By." This story takes place during a Mother's Day Lobster Brunch at Azalea Cafe in Austin, and all the major characters in the cycle are in some way involved in the set of events that occurs at Azalea Cafe on that day. Two framing stories, "Fear Is a Lie Told in the Daytime" and "Narcosis," help to integrate the collection into a tight-knit unit. Both of these stories center around the return of their protagonists to the water—the element that gave rise to all life. So the collection circles back upon itself and the cycle ends where it begins.Item Myth, preference, and processing(Texas Tech University, 1998-05) Brant, LindaThe objective of this investigation was to explore the cognitive representation, aesthetic appreciation, and on-line processing of the hero motif in short stories. The overall goals were to determine if participants had a schema for the hero motif, and to examine the effects of variations in episode content and sequence on preference ratings, recall of story ideas, and reading rate for specific sentences. These goals were pursued in one pilot study, and two experiments. Results from the pilot study indicated that undergraduate students had a schema for the hero motif, and that they were able to predict events in typical hero stories with high levels of accuracy and confidence. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that variations in episode content and sequence had virtually no effect on preference ratings. However, these variations did influence recall of story information. The most memorable hero stories contained (1)episodes that were presented in a logical, temporal sequence, (2) typical beginning episodes, and (3) typical middle episodes. In contrast, story endings were best remembered if they contained atypical information. In both Experiments 1 and 2, a positive correlation emerged between ratings of story preference and ratings of empathy with the main character. Implications for the field of empirical aesthetics were discussed.Item Old age in the short story: state of mind and metaphor(Texas Tech University, 1965-05) Cooper, Shirley RuddellNot availableItem Perimeters of experience in the contemporary Mexican short story.(Texas Tech University, 1975-08) Gill, Mary JoyceNot availableItem Publishing short stories : British modernist fiction and the literary marketplace(2012-08) Zacks, Aaron Shanohn; Winship, Michael, 1950-; Nadel, Ira; Friedman, Alan; Carter, Mia; Lesser, WayneThe short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre.Item Texas bright(2006-05) Jones, Kimberley Kaye; Smith, Alex, approximately 1967-This thesis consists of two feature-length screenplays, the drama Texas Bright, and the comedic drama The Summer of Breaking Into Public Pools, as well as "Funny Face," a spec script for the ABC medical drama, Grey's Anatomy.Item The distribution of present-day short story writers over the United States(Texas Tech University, 1940-08) Bain, VadaNot availableItem The structural pattern of the contemporary short story(Texas Tech University, 1937-08) Bussey, NovelleNot available